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Date and Orange Salad
1 cup Dromedary Dates 4 large oranges Crisp lettuce leaves French dressing Separate dates, cover with boiling water and cook for 3 minutes. Drain, dry in the oven, and cool. Stone dates and cut in halves lengthwise. Halve oranges and cut out sections of pulp. Arrange lettuce leaves on a large salad plate, pile oranges in center, surround with dates, and serve with French dressing.
A simple arranged fruit salad from a date-packer's promotional booklet. Almost everything here is assembly; the only technique worth attention is the brief blanching of the dates.
- Why blanch the datesBoxed dates of the period were often dry and stuck together in a solid brick. The three-minute boil loosens and plumps them. The recipe gives no oven setting; a low oven — around 200-250F for ten minutes or so, until the surface is no longer wet — is a reasonable modern reading, and drying keeps them from watering down the dressing. Soft, pitted modern dates need none of this — separate, halve and use them as they are.
- Stoning"Stone" means pit. Slit lengthwise with a paring knife and lift the pit out; medjools and deglet noor both give up their pits easily once split.
- Sectioning the oranges"Halve oranges and cut out sections of pulp" means scooping or cutting the sections from the halved fruit, which leaves ragged membrane. Supreming — cutting away peel and pith, then freeing each segment between the membranes — gives cleaner wedges and no bitter pith in the dressing. Four large oranges should give roughly 2 cups of segments.
- French dressing, 1912 senseFrench dressing, period sense -- Not the sweet orange-red bottled dressing, which is a later product. It means a plain vinaigrette: about three parts oil to one part vinegar or lemon juice, salt, pepper, whisked or shaken to combine. On fruit, lemon juice and a mild oil work better than a sharp vinegar.
- Dressing at the last momentOil-dressed citrus goes watery within minutes as the segments release juice. Arrange the plate, then spoon the dressing over as it goes to the table.
- Lettuce"Crisp lettuce leaves" would have meant a firm head lettuce, here serving as a cup or bed for the fruit. Any sturdy leaf works; a limp leaf collapses under the fruit.
- YieldServes four to six as a side or first course, or four as a light luncheon salad.
This comes from a recipe booklet issued by the Hills Brothers Company to promote Dromedary brand dates, packed in New York from fruit largely grown in the Middle East and North Africa before California's Coachella Valley plantings came into commercial bearing. Booklets like this were the standard American marketing device of the early twentieth century: a branded ingredient dropped into every course of the meal, salads included. Salads had been moving from a plain course of greens toward the elaborate composed plates that would dominate American entertaining for the next fifty years, and dates offered exactly the sweet, dark contrast that made a plate look considered. The instruction to boil and re-dry the dates is the tell of the period's packaging: before modern moisture-barrier wrapping, dates arrived hard and clumped.